Joke Line apologizes for being a mealy-mouthed prick, buthey, he didn’t really mean it, anyway:
It is appropriate that Obama’s speech to the DAV will not be remembered
as vividly as George W. Bush’s puerile march across the deck of an
aircraft carrier, costumed as a combat aviator against a golden sunset,
to announce — seven years and tens of thousands of lives prematurely —
the “end of combat operations.” Obama’s announcement was no
celebration. It was a somber acknowledgment that amends will be made to
those whose lives were shattered and that their courageous service in
an unnecessary cause will be honored. A national discussion about
America’s place in the world, and the military’s excessive place in our
foreign policy, would also be appropriate in the wake of this disaster,
but I’m not holding my breath.As for myself, I deeply regret that once, on television in the days
before the war, I foolishly — spontaneously — said that going ahead
with the invasion might be the right thing to do. I was far more
skeptical in print. I never wrote in favor of the war and repeatedly
raised the problems that would accompany it, but mere skepticism was an
insufficient reaction too. The issue then was as clear as it is now. It
demanded a clarity that I failed to summon. The essential principle is
immutable: we should never go to war unless we have been attacked or
are under direct, immediate threat of attack. Never. And never again.
Well, Joke, it didn’t really demand clarity. It demanded that you sit at the table with the pot-smoking hippies and listen to them play their digeridoos or whatever and smell their patchouli while the cool kids were over at the other table fucking Dean Wormer’s wife and giving everybody wedgies. That’s all this was about and that’s all this will ever be about so long as our national pundit class is composed entirely of fucking sheltered children who have no idea how anything functions outside their gated mental communities.
If the war had been a glorious success? If in the wake of our freedom bombs people had decided they loved us more than they loved their dead children and built statues of George W. Bush in every public square and Iraq made Orange County look like a ghetto? Then Joke would be apologizing for being insufficiently supportive, having only once weakly approved of going to war, and being even more skeptical in print about what in retrospect was so perfectly obvious. Then he’d be talking about the moral clarity demanded of us in order to kick those hippies right in the face, because this isn’t for one second about being right or wrong.
This is Joke apologizing for having been, marginally, kind of, sort of, spontaneously, and only on TV, on the losing side.
Via Balloon Juice’s comments.
A.